5 Tips for Happiness Reinforced by My Family Vacation.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: my family vacation reminded me of these 5 tips for happiness.

I just returned from a wonderful family vacation. Beautiful weather, mostly cheerful children, and no major mishaps (no travel disasters, bicycle crashes, poison ivy, etc.)

Being on vacation reminded me of several things about happiness – the first being, remember to take a vacation! Especially given the technology these days, it’s tempting to have a change of scenery and call it a vacation. But a vacation really means taking a break from work.

I was reminded of several other happiness principles, as well:

1. Fun is important to happiness. Is there such a thing as "fun for the whole family"? I think so, but I've learned that on vacation I need to make sure I make time for the things that I find fun – which in my case means reading. Sometimes I think, “Why am I just lying here, reading, on such a beautiful day? I should be going for a run/playing in the ocean/learning to play tennis.” But it's a Secret of Adulthood – Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for me. I love to read, and now I let myself read as much as I can get away with, given the realities of a family vacation. After all, I still do plenty of other things. And speaking of that Secret of Adulthood, the converse is true:

2. Just because something isn’t fun for me doesn’t mean that someone else won't find it fun. For instance, grocery shopping. It finally dawned on me that my husband loves to make a quick trip to the grocery store. I kept trying to make lists and be efficient and ask if he really had to make another trip to the store, until I realized: he loves to bike over to the grocery store for a few items. One day he went four times. That’s FUN for him.

3. Sleep is important to happiness – the more I learn about sleep, the more convinced I become of that fact. Sleep keeps people feeling cheerier, it strengthens the immune system, it may even play a role in keeping weight off. According to one study, a bad night’s sleep was one of the top two factors that upset people’s daily moods (along with tight work deadlines). Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for your daily happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.

Accordingly, over the last few years, I’ve made a big effort to get more sleep – but during this vacation, there were several nights when I got TEN HOURS of sleep. Yes, I went to sleep at 9:30 p.m. and slept until 7:30 a.m., which I just wouldn’t have thought possible. This suggests to me that I may still not be getting enough sleep in my usual routine.

4. One irksome task can make vacation more fun. Some interesting studies suggest that interrupting a pleasant experience with something less pleasant can intensify a person’s overall pleasure. For example, commercials make TV-watching more fun.

For the last ten months, I’d been procrastinating about ordering a photo album from Shutterfly with our family pictures, and the task had really started to weigh on my mind. For this vacation, I decided to take a break from all work, except to do that photo album. This plan worked beautifully. Not doing my usual work make me relaxed, and having one irksome chore gave me the delicious feeling of goofing off – except when I actually did make myself do it. And I did get that task crossed off my list, which was enormously satisfying.

5. Everyone’s happiness project is different. (This is related to #1-2.) I met a very nice guy who described to me how he’d fulfilled his lifelong dream of buying a farm, where he’s raising some organic crops as well as pigs, cows, and I believe, goats. He was beaming with delight as he described how much he loved every aspect of it. I can think of few things that would make me feel more miserable than having a farm like his. Happiness projects just don’t look the same.

On a less elevated note, I would add that if you’re traveling with children, it never hurts to pack a few items of novelty candy for a long car ride. That, and a Harry Potter audiobook, will take you a long way.

* This article on Slate, Seeking: How the Brain Hard-Wires Us to Love Google, Twitter, and Texting, and Why That’s Dangerous, is absolutely fascinating. I think it has all sorts of happiness implications, but I haven’t quite figured out what they are yet.

* Because I've been on vacation, it's been at least a few days since I mentioned that the book The Happiness Project is coming out in a few months. Yes, it's true! Order early and often. (But seriously: if you're inclined to buy the book, pre-orders really give a boost to a book. The early show of enthusiasm makes a big difference, so I really appreciate it.)

Comments

[Positively Present]

Great post on happiness and what you learned on vacation. I recently came back from vacation as well and wrote a list of all the things I learned while I was away. It was so great to learn new things and then to get home and really think about them. Thanks for sharing these tips!

[Di]

Missed you but I think you deserve a few more ten hour nights, should have kept your return a secret a little while longer!

[Heather]

When my now grown up children were small and we went on vacation we got together before we left and we each said what we wanted to do on vacation. We did this because we had a few holidays where our expectations were mismatched and they were'nt the happiest holidays. Mine was always read 2 or 3 books and sleep in, my husband's was go fishing, or play golf and my kids liked to go to the country life farm and feed the rabbits, or swim every day. It worked well not only because everyone had the holiday they wanted, but that we all realised that our fun wasn't fun for everyone else.

[Yoga Spy]

That Slate article is fascinating. We are indeed training our minds to need constant stimuli. Who among us doesn't multitask? And I'm addicted only to email, blogging, and surfing the Net (no thanks to Twitter and Facebook).

We are also training ourselves to ignore our sleep needs (I'm a daily offender). Years ago I read William C Dement's The Promise of Sleep, to try to understand a friend who struggled with insomnia. I recall reading that sleep deficits are cumulative (if you miss an hour for a week, you are actually missing seven hours) and absolutely must be made up (for optimum health). So, your 10 hour sleep marathons were indeed telling you something!

[Kris]

Thanks for the tips and for coming back to your blog! I don't know about anyone else, but I missed reading it!

[K Floortime Lite Mama]

I simply love this blog
i will buy your book

[The Healthy Librarian]

So glad to hear you're vacation was a huge relaxing success and you had the chance to just chill.

I'm on vacation right now and it's heaven. Nothing but beaching it, biking, hiking, reading and hanging out. Really!

Amazing how rejuvenating it is.

Way too relaxed to take the time to blog about it--or anything else!

So..here's what I learned from last summer's retreat:

The Happy (mostly) Healthy Family Vacation on Martha's Vineyard

http://www.happyhealthylonglife.com/happy_healthy_long_life/2008/06/the-happy-mostly-healthy-family-vacation-to-marthas-vineyard.html

[Kate]

Hi Gretchen,

Welcome back! I missed your blog while you were away but I'm happy that you had a great break. It's great to be reminded of the need for time out for fun - so instead of doing some jobs around the house this Sunday, we (husband and three children) are going to catch the ferry in the morning and spend the day visiting some friends staying on Rottnest Island. http://www.rottnestisland.com/en/pages/Home.aspx
You've inspired me!

[Betsy Connolly]

I too missed you while you were on vacation. I read you via an RSS feed into Feed Demon. Usually I look forward to your daily post, but your mailbox was empty for awhile.

I read with interest your comments about the need for sleep. You might want to read my blog - see the posting women and sleep at: http://www.workingnights.com/blog/2008/04/30/women-and-sleep/
We don't discriminate - we have men and sleep too at:http://www.workingnights.com/blog/2008/04/29/improving-men%e2%80%99s-sleep/

[dr aletta]

For two weeks in July, during our family's vacation, I left my laptop at home and stayed off line! No TV either. I thought it would be hard but it really wasn't. It was wonderful. By week two I felt so good. I had forgotten what being truly relaxed was like. I recommend it.

[Delia Lloyd]

Gretch
Lloyd loves shopping too and I hate it. Took me years to just let go and allow him the European multi-shop experience (me, I'm a one stop shopping efficiency maven). My dad was the same way (and my mom is like me). Which ties to a corollary of all this: marry someone whose traits complement rather than perfectly substitute for your own...I think this could be a good blog post!
Delia Lloyd
www.realdelia.com

[Gretchen Rubin]

Thanks for the nice words of welcome. It was great to go away, but great to be back.

[Karl Staib - Work Happy Now]

It's great to have you back. I miss my daily dose of happiness.

Vacation are a great way to expose old patterns and really see what we are made of. As for the sleep thing. I'm with ya. I've been getting about 6 hours of sleep because of our new baby. It's been a joy, but I sure do miss my 8 hours.

[Mary Ellen]

My husband and I love to go to new, odd grocery stores and just walk around. It's like visiting a foreign country.

I notice that the two sleep studies that you mentioned are actually the same study, just different reports by different news organizations.

[Louise]

I, too, love to grocery shop for just a few items at a time. But there's a catch: I have to be able to go on my scooter! Zipping a mile or two to the store on my little step-through makes me feel chic and cosmopolitan.

I also love to pay the bills and keep track of the finances. My husband hates those tasks so much that he struggled to let go of them. He couldn't imagine asking me to do such an onerous thing! Took me several years to convince him that I actually like it.

Perhaps this is the real reason why opposites attract?

[Molly]

Hi Gretchen,

This is an excited and eager response to your post on Slate today! I too wonder about the connection between worrying about weight and happiness. Over a long period of time I went from being exercise-averse to knowing that doing it very often is essential for my happiness. I started doing it to lose weight--but no dice there! But what *kept* me doing it was the mood boost I could count on--instant gratification. And I try to eat mindfully: "will I feel better after I eat this or worse?" Sometimes with sweets, I'll feel good. Often, if it's just impulsive, I won't. It's been an enormous lifestyle change for me, and very connected to my happiness.

So with all this mindfulness and attention to mood, I can't let go of the frustration that my weight hasn't changed. I've been looking for books on the subject, and there's not much out there. In the now-dated "When Women Stop Hating their Bodies," which ignores the very real obesity epidemic, the authors do describe a problem that resonated with me: Bad Body Fever. A bad body thought--an "I need to lose weight thought" needs to be pondered. Is that really what I'm worried about, is that really what I want to "fix"? They describe a similar wonderful contradiction that keeps coming up in mindfulness: before you can change anything, you have to love and accept it just as it is. And you have to let go of judgment--good foods versus bad foods, instead of, am I truly hungry, or am I feeding an emotional hunger? They also put it very much in a feminist context, which I think is an important aspect (it may be more of an issue for women's happiness projects than men's, we'll see).

Sometimes I think the weight on the scale is a gold star I wish for. I'm healthy, my doctors look puzzled when I say I'm worried about my weight not changing, and I try to eat and exercise mindfully and with the main goal of making myself happy. What a difficult gold star to let go of though! Don't I want the scale to reflect all the healthy changes I've made?!

[All Women Stalker]

Sleep is always important. No truer words have been spoken.

-meream

[LadyDoc]

Just wanted to tell you I pre-ordered the book today through Amazon.

I hope you have a great success with it!

[Daryl Furuyama]

Those are some good tips. The only one I might be cautious about is the one about the irksome task. Sure the bad helps highlight the good, but should we intentionally seek bad things in our lives just to appreicate the good?

[Annabel Candy]

Glad you had a good holiday and learnt some useful tips to share with us. I've been actually trying to cut down on my hours of sleep so I can fit more in. I manged to cut back to 6 or 7 hours so I could achieve my goals but I was getting tired. Now I've regressed completely and am back into oversleeping. Well, 7am compared to the 5.30am I was managing previously. Loving it!

The bit about giving the kids candies during journeys made me laugh. We took out three offspring round Central America for 18 months and I told people that our kids might be well-traveled when older, but probably toothless after all the sweets we plied them with. Very naughty! Still, regular brushing seems to have negated any ill effects and none of them have even had any fillings so far:)

[Lauren]

Gretchen,

Thanks for linking to that article! It was fascinating! (I'm a psych student, so I'm a little biased.)

[Lim]

I let a friend borrow "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" for a multi-state trip. Two adults, two teens. If the driver forgot to turn it on (after stopping for lunch, for example) from the backseat would come "Hem, hem."

[Suddenly Susan]

I really liked Heather's post. Asking the other person what they want to do on vacation ... what a novel idea! My first ex-husband and I were driving down the road one day and he was talking about where we would live and what we would do upon retirement ~ fishing. It was the beginning of the end of our marriage. My "now" husband likes to do completely different things than I do on vacation but we both get to do things we want to do. Love this post!